Business blogging is today possibly the most important activity you can be doing to get customers on to your website.

Most small business owners at this point will have immediately switched off and not read the rest of this article, because they simply cannot get past the word ‘blogging’ and how on earth they fit it in to their daily schedule. But this article is much more about how to fit the blogging into your daily schedule and how to do it.

Dictate your Blog

I am dictating this article into my IPhone using the voice memo app, having just done a school run from my home in the North West into Chester. I am currently driving home afterwards and dictating this article, my second of the day. It takes probably 5 to 10 minutes to dictate the article and a further 30 seconds to press the button to email it to the transcription company who type out my recording and send me a word document with the content. Be careful of course – whilst you can speak whilst driving, you cannot use your screen.

This is by far the easiest and most cost efficient way of doing this work, but how does it make any difference to your website?

If you do nothing with the recording then the answer is very simple – it does nothing for your website whatsoever. The transcription will sit in your inbox and stay there forever and a day unless you do something about it, which is to turn document into an article or blog entry on your website.

The 3 page Website = No Business

Take the average website of a small business – for example a window cleaner. This imaginary window cleaner has a standard website, probably sold to them at a very expensive price by Yell.com or Wix.com or similar, and contains a total of three pages; the first page is the front page which basically has a few pictures of some windows and perhaps the window cleaner’s smiling face. The second page will be a contact page which will hopefully have some contact details enabling customers to make enquiries about the window cleaner’s services. The third page is very often a news page or blog. A blog is simply a collection of articles and should never be considered anything else. So many small businesses think that there is some sort of magic to the word ‘blog’ and it requires specialist assistance to set one up, but that is simply untrue. All you need to do is create a page on your website, call it news or blog and off you go.

The vast majority of businesses have absolutely no news whatsoever or blog entries, but simply a page that may have one entry on it from when they set the website up which will contain some waffling nonsense about how they provide fantastic service, or something that occurred 5 years ago that they have written a few lines about. This is the page that you need to populate with lots of information, as this is the page that Google will start going to, to search for relevant up to date key words and information about your business that they can put into their listings for reference and use by others.

Start Today

It is the easiest way to keep your website up to date and also to generate business. If you have a Facebook page, Twitter account or other social media then you can link your blog into this simply by posting the link to any articles you dictate into your phone, into your social media accounts as a separate post.

So not only have you got an article for your website, but you have also gained a tweet and a Facebook post, together with anything else you can think of in the social media world. And the chances of somebody seeing your article are considerably higher because not only is it posted on your website but it is also posted elsewhere, and somebody may even retweet it or like it if the information contained in it is of sufficient interest.

Producing articles of sufficient interest is another matter entirely and we’ll deal with it in a separate article!